Isaac bénissant Jacob

Genesis tells it in a few blunt lines. Old Isaac, nearly blind, is tricked into blessing his younger son Jacob, who has wrapped his arms in goatskins so they feel like the hairy arms of his brother Esau. Murillo paints the con in progress. Rebecca, the mother who planned it, steers Jacob toward the bed with one hand and looks straight out at us, quietly making anyone watching an accomplice. Around them he opens a soft, Italian-style landscape, unusual for him, the herd drifting off to the right. He painted it in Seville in the 1660s, and it reached the Hermitage in 1811, bought in Paris for Russia by Vivant Denon, the same man who was then filling Napoleon's Louvre.